It's just after 8 a.m. on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, and the 26-year-old actress Evangeline Lilly pads into her kitchen in a pair of terry-cloth slippers and puts a kettle on the stove. She's been up for hours, having just taken the puddle jumper from Kauai, where she spent the last two days climbing trees and chasing toads for ELLE's photo shoot. Even the big Starbucks latte she drank earlier hasn't erased the puffiness around her eyes. She drops a couple of Irish breakfast tea bags into mismatched earthenware mugs, plunks down at her kitchen table, and apologizes. "I'm so hopped up on caffeine right now," she says almost regally, suggesting there have been elocution lessons in her past. "It's very uncouth of me, but that's what I'm doing."

In the realm of Hollywood excess, caffeine jitters probably wouldn't set off any couth alarms. Exiting the bathroom with a noticeable ring of powder around your nostrils might not even qualify as bad form anymore. It also would have been well within the realm of couth for Lilly to have let me fend for myself finding her bungalow, tucked away in the suburban town of Kailua, rather than calling before I left New York with specific driving directions from my Waikiki hotel through the verdant Koolau Mountain range. She even advised me to pack a sweater. This is the kind of practicality that you might expect from your nana, not the breakout female star of the goliath series that won six Emmys and helped put ABC back on top in the ratings war. But if you know anything about Lilly's history, none of this will surprise you. Her story could be seen as a Hollywood take on the Greystoke legend. Until she was cast in Lost, her most notable speaking role had been in a commercial for a cheesy Canadian chat line; she had no idea that the word pilot meant anything other than a guy who flies a plane. When asked once what item she would take if marooned on a deserted island, the former Sunday school teacher didn't answer a gun, a lighter, or a Whole Foods. She said, "My Bible." She spent her hiatus after wrapping the first season of Lost helping a friend doing missionary relief work in Rwanda.

So, predictably, this Sunday morning, everything about Lilly remains supercouth, almost churchy. New Age music plays softly on the stereo as she conducts a tour of the modest whitewash bungalow she shares with two women who have both done stand-in work for her on Lost. She evinces thrifty pride in pointing out the well-worn '70s-era brown leather furniture she picked up at a Salvation Army when she arrived on the island two years ago, which imbues the place with a post-college-pad vibe. "I furnished my entire living room for about $300! Don't you think it makes sense?" exclaims the woman who will soon make about $80,000 an episode, but still has no plans for redecoration or booting those roommates to the curb, even though one of them, she discovers, has polished off her milk without replacing it. At least there's a water view, sort of. "There are rumors that it has flesh-eating disease in it," Lilly says, gazing at the muddy canal that passes behind her house. Hundreds of nasty-looking fish clamor at the surface. "But I know it's not true because I've been completely immersed in it." Sweet girl, she even cautions me to mind my feet in the grass, since it's dewy in the morning. It's all very proper, that is, until the second cup of tea. As she's pouring hot water from the kettle, Lilly motions to the plate with the tea bags between us. "Do you want me to put your bag in?" she asks.

"I'll put my bag in," I answer blandly. There is barely a beat before she opens her crystalline green eyes wide and her face explodes into a mischievous smile.

"That's what he said!" she says, unleashing a throaty laugh you'll never hear in a million years on Lost.

Gulp.

Evangeline Lilly, perhaps because of the show she's on, defies being taken at face value. Lost demands that viewers hone their paranoia to a needle point. Even the X-Files, which, in its day, acquired a similar brand of superloyal obsessive fans, seems quaint with its defining mantra, Trust no one. Lost's defining mantra seems to be, Nothing is as it seems, and don't even try to guess what the hell's going on here. The setup is straightforward: A jumbo jet en route from Sydney, Australia, to Los Angeles flies severely off course and breaks apart midair, dropping 48 surviving passengers on a seemingly deserted island. From there, it gets weird. There are other nonindigenous folks encamped on the island. They have guns, poor hygiene, and an unsettling habit of abducting children. There's an underground bunker left behind by a scientific corporation which demands that its occupants punch a series of numbers into a computer every 108 minutes for God knows what reason. Oh, and there's a resident polar bear. And even if you do watch the show, none of this makes any sense.

Neither, for that matter, does Lilly's character, Kate Austen. At first blush, Kate is the picture of moral rectitude, a real good camper. She seldom complains and, despite not having much to do besides pick fruit and get abducted by the occasional armed horde, resists passing any of that free time horizontally with either of her gorgeous suitors.

Then we find out that precrash, Kate robbed a bank and killed at least one guy. This discovery might be actually less jarring than hearing Lilly—who, a show producer attests, keeps a Bible with her at all times—blithely flick a filthy double entendre into conversation over tea. "There's a lot of that Christian good girl in her," says Jorge Garcia, who plays Lost's rotund slacker, Hurley, "but sometimes certain things come out of her mouth. She's got the devil mixed in there too."

"She has an absolutely filthy, filthy mouth," says Bryan Burk, a Lost executive producer. "She can swear like a sailor and dress provocatively, but that doesn't reflect her beliefs. She's a walking oxymoron."

There's also the unsolved mystery of her romantic life. "If you ask me a question about love, relationships, or anything of that sort, the interview will be over. Over!" she says, smiling, but there's a steeliness behind the declaration. On her fridge a few feet away hangs a snapshot of her in Paris with Dominic Monaghan, who plays Lost's junkie British rocker, Charlie. Lilly has been photographed in every stage of canoodle with the actor, who is best known for donning hairy feet to play the hobbit Merry in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Superficially, they're oddly matched. Even today, low on sleep, without a hint of makeup, hair clipped back, and a snug mustard T-shirt that says (inexplicably even to her) What Would Dieter Do?, she's gorgeous, her face at alternate moments conjuring Liv Tyler without the pillow lips and Lara Flynn Boyle without the Hollywood mileage. Hormonal teenage boys agree: She was No. 2 on Maxim's Hot 100 list. Monaghan, though appealing in his way, probably doesn't wait by the phone for People magazine to call during Sexiest Man Alive season. Gossip columns reported their engagement at the beginning of the year. Not before British tabloids also reported that when Lilly bid adieu to Canada, she left behind a fellow named Murray Hone, an amateur hockey player she'd married the year before.

Neither Lilly nor Monaghan talk about their relationship, and her coworkers seem to have gotten the memo: "I don't need to face the wrath of Evie," chuckles Garcia. Though Matthew Fox, who plays saintly doctor Jack, says he did sit Lilly down to discuss potential problems in getting cozy with a colleague.

"It was never a warning," Fox says. "It just needed to be said. I felt like it wasn't something you'd want to jump into without [looking at] all the angles."

She got an early crash course in tuning out chatter. Nicole Evangeline Lilly was raised Baptist and Mennonite in Fort Saskatchewan, a tiny prairie town in Alberta that dips well below zero degrees in winter. Her dad was the produce manager at Safeway, and her mom tried to make ends meet by working the local Estée Lauder counter and operating a day care out of the house. It didn't always work. "We lived on cabbage for a week at one point," Lilly says. They were poor every day except for Christmas; her father would take bank loans so he could go overboard for Lilly and her two sisters. Caroling started the day after Halloween; her older sister would throw up from excitement every Christmas Eve.

Puberty arrived late—at 16—and Lilly, who'd been a tomboy her whole life, became beautiful overnight. When I ask what her high school classmates would say about her, her face darkens. "If you polled them the year I graduated, they would have said that I was a slut," she says. "And the most I had ever done is French kiss. It was because of the way I looked. I was always the girl who hung out with the boys. What I didn't realize was that after I hit puberty I was something different to the guys. They all wanted to get in my pants. They couldn't, so they just said they did."

So ironically to those of us who grew up ugly as turnips, Lilly says she prayed for deliverance: "I spent many nights crying myself to sleep wishing I was ugly because of the way men leered and disrespected me, because they assumed things about my mental capacity or my physical willingness based on the way I look." The work world wasn't much kinder. Lilly quit her job waiting tables at Earls, a trendy Canadian chain—which helped put her through the University of British Columbia, where she studied international relations—after being ogled one time too many. "I felt like a whore," she says. "You feel like they're paying to stare at your ass when you're walking away from the table."

Naturally, Lilly took to the notion of a career in show business much like a chicken would take to a hot bath in a fry-o-lator. "I avoided the industry for so long because I resent it for so many reasons," she says. "There was no way that my ideas about life and morality were going to coincide with that industry, so there was no point in even playing with fire." She only relented, she says, because doing commercials was an easier way to pay her tuition than, say, doing oil changes on big rigs, which, along with working as a flight attendant, a teacher's aide, a camp counselor, a Sunday school teacher, and a waitress, was how she supported herself from the age of 15. She didn't want to be an actress; she wanted to be a humanitarian. Although she made good money with the Ford Agency doing the telephone chat line commercial, she preferred hiding in the background, doing extra work on film shoots in Vancouver. (Remember her as that corpse on Kingdom Hospital?)

Then, a person she describes only as "a friend" gave her some enlightening advice, the kind you might get from, say, the man to whom you're married. This friend told her she was afraid of facing her own success. "I bawled my eyes out on the spot," she says. "It triggered something. Ever since high school I had done things so people wouldn't just respect me because of the way I looked. I decided, to hell with it. I'm going to pursue mediocrity, and I'm going to be so happy." She went on her first audition in January 2004. Six weeks later, in a development that doubtlessly drove scores of Hollywood starlets into therapy, Lilly was in Hawaii filming Lost. While fast-forwarding though her audition tape, the show's co-creator J. J. Abrams had seen that ineffable something that had inspired him to cast relative unknowns Jennifer Garner and Keri Russell in Alias and Felicity.

Says co-creator Damon Lindelof: "When J. J. said 'Stop!' and we saw Evie read the scene for the first time, we were all like, 'Get that girl on a plane immediately!'"

We're driving around Lilly's neighborhood in Kailua. It's not just the two of us; a little photo of Monaghan stares out from the dashboard of Lilly's 2001 Ford Escape SUV. We stop at the bin by the elementary school where she drops off her recycling—Hawaii, despite its Eden-like appearance, is actually more polluted than you'd ever guess. Oahu has yet to adopt a comprehensive curbside recycling program, and the local Waimanalo Gulch landfill is dangerously close to capacity. The problems are visible even on the less populated North Shore, which doubles for Lost's tropical isle. "We're often in the most remote areas of the jungle," Lilly says. "You can't see road, you can't see people, and at almost every step, we stumble across an abandoned vehicle, beer cans, tires, or trash because people just dump it." Lilly resolved to help. When she turned 26, she dragged a recycling bin to the set and made on-set recycling her birthday wish.

That's just the beginning; her dream of humanitarianism is closer than ever. She recently read a little primer in the form of an Audrey Hepburn biography. "Wow, that is the life I would kill to emulate," she says. "I actually feel like I'm more capable now of doing humanitarian work because I'm financially able to make a difference. You have to sacrifice something to get something. For me, fame is that sacrifice, because I never wanted it, and I still don't. It's something I have to live with." Even on this little island—a neighborhood boy stole her favorite panties right off her clothesline; one night some drunk kids pulled into her driveway, beckoning her to come out. The buzz is getting louder. On Valentine's Day, two days after our visit, AOL's gossip site went on high bump alert, posting a photo of a yawning Lilly jutting out her belly, suggesting that a little hobbit-human hybrid was percolating within. Two days after that, perhaps coincidentally, Lilly fired her publicist.

And of course, everyone wants to know how naked Lost's Bible girl is willing to get. There's that magazine photo shoot that made her weep when she saw it. "It was too sexy for me," she says. "It crossed my line." Though producers have been conscious of her request to keep skin shots to a minimum, thanks to a new bra she's been wearing on the show, Fox has dubbed her Cleavie. And there's one actor who thinks he'll put an end to Kate's series-long celibacy: "I hope we come together in a kind of angry, animalistic thing, and then she realizes her folly when I'm like, 'Now get me a beer, woman,'" says Josh Holloway, who plays Sawyer, the less savory man competing for Kate's affection, apparently even during phone interviews. "I have been calling these writers from the beginning going, 'When's Sawyer going to get some action? How about even second base?' They're just not thinking enough with the little head. They've got all these huge concepts and major plotlines. But how about getting down to some core Freud."

Lilly, however, has larger considerations than who'll be sampling her mango on Lost: her future as an actress. Though she has expressed interest in the past in donning Wonder Woman's bulletproof wrist cuffs on-screen, there have been no calls from Buffy creator Joss Whedon, the writer-director of the upcoming film. "You know whose career is fascinating to me?" she asks, standing on a Kailua beach. "Scarlett Johansson's. She's intensely successful in the way I'd like to be if I do film. People don't look at her and think, This is the next girl for the cutesy pie romantic comedy. They think, This is the next girl for the really meaningful, dramatic Woody Allen film. Jeez, that's a compliment." I point out that Johansson recently bared her buttocks on the cover of Vanity Fair. "Really?" Lilly says, sounding disappointed. "I'm curious: Can you be respected as an actress and show your ass? Do you have to show your ass?" She looks out at the sea and thinks for a moment, as if only God Himself might have the answers to those eternal questions.